Cut loose
from Jewish Studies, the discourse of diaspora appears to have undergone an
opening up and become a global space of difference and cultural democracy in the
prevailing ideological climate. Mapping the uncharted diasporic territories is
considered nowadays to be not only politically correct but also academically
fashionable. In this stormy age when theories shift as if by default like the
wallpaper on one’s desktop, quite a few souls find intellectual asylum, if not
anchorage, in diaspora studies. And why should they not? Diaspora studies offer,
in addition to intellectual and other kinds of fellowship, a sense of
gratification that derives from the vanity of serving national and ethnic
interests. That this service may be commandeered by a certain global
cultural-political economy is a matter that is discreetly overlooked though.

Hence the
rediscovery –after its passage through dehistoricization and semantic
aggrandizement– of the term diaspora
and its reception, which compares favourably with the kind usually reserved for
the news of isolation of some elusive virus: the rediscovery brings a sense of
euphoria and empowerment, as if to
name were to bring under control. The fog appears to lift at once, and the
dark territory seems to bare itself to light.

But I am
afraid there has been a good deal of concealing in this revealing, so that the
liberating articulation has also come to mean, in effect, a certain amount of
disciplining and exclusion of the repressive kind.

I shall give
my fears the rude shape of an unsophisticated question: Which kinds of diaspora
find home in the diasporic literary and cultural studies in our departments in
the prevailing environment?

The question
is, by default, tagged to the burden1 of English, the language that
is the chief gatekeeper to the discipline of diaspora studies in
India today.
While I acknowledge the opulent multivalence of the word ‘burden’ operative in
the present context and indicated in the footnotes below, I would nevertheless
emphasize that we need to take account of the disciplinary implications of
English for the diasporic literary and cultural studies in contemporary
India.

In terms of
visibility, our diasporic literary landscape is disproportionately dominated by
those who write in English. This is so in spite of the fact that English cannot
be seen as being in possession of any special properties that should make it a
privileged language for articulating the experiences of homelessness and
hybridity. The (post)colonial link and the international publishing circuit are
two obvious players implicated in the formation of this literary landscape,
having contributed to the almost exclusive concentration of the phenomenon known
as Indian diasporic writing in the English-speaking affluent West. But this has
also come to mean, in effect, the invisibility of such writing elsewhere in the
world. Fiji, Mauritius, Sri Lanka, Kenya, South Africa, Malaysia, Central Asia,
the Middle East, Italy, Greece – these and many other countries and regions also
have a sizeable Indian diaspora (the Middle East alone has over three million
Indians). Is the Indian diaspora in these parts of the world an entirely
un-literate diaspora, without any creditable literary and cultural production?
If it is, why?

The problem
lies, I am inclined to be persuaded, with the geo-literary politics and
economics in which our institutional structures are implicated and as a result
of which they have little space for considering the diasporic literary
production other than in English and from places other than the affluent
English-speaking West. Since it is the departments of English that have acted as
the major agencies of cultural studies in
India and since
the interface with other departments has been negligible (for reasons for which
all sides are responsible), diasporic literary and cultural studies have failed
to grow up as a cross-linguistic or trans-linguistic discipline.

To my mind,
diasporic writing in Punjabi is probably no less prolific than that in English.
Similar might be the case of diasporic writing in Hindi, Malayalam and Gujarati,
if we could presume some link between the large diasporic communities speaking
these languages and the odds for literary production in these languages. The
privilege that the English language enjoys vis-à-vis other languages arguably
derives from its uniquely strategic global position and imperial historical
legacy, not from any extraordinary semiotic aura or competence. The privilege,
moreover, is slanted in favour of writers from the
US and the
UK.

In addition
to the favours of the contemporary historical moment, one needs to account for
the privileges of class and of the written word that underwrite the predominance
of a particular kind of diasporic literature. It is not without significance
that the recognized and acclaimed writers should all belong to the ‘new’
diaspora as against the ‘old’, to use and extend the classification indicated in
Vinay Lal’s work. They belong, in other words, to the recognized, pampered and
articulate-in-English middle class diaspora of the modern industrial and
post-industrial societies as against the disowned, elided and mute working class
diaspora that has always barely survived on the margins. The latter diaspora
includes not only the indentured labour of the former colonies and the
descendants of those people but also the temporary diaspora of contract workers
and the diaspora of twilight
comprising those who constitute the staple merchandise of international human
trafficking. The ‘new’ diaspora is pampered as it fits in usefully with the
ascendant ideological and economic world order in which India’s ruling class is
scrambling to find a berth: hence the uncontrollable urge to confer on this
diaspora a dual citizenship even as people of the other diaspora languish in a
no-law’s land as non-persons, legal non-entities in possession of “bare life”
without the rights of personhood or citizenship (Giorgio Agamben).The privileged location of the ‘new’
diaspora in the apparatus of international publishing and of awards and prizes
makes the discrimination painfully clear. But how long the unacknowledged but
essentially phony distinction between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ would be sustained
does not need to be foretold: the bluff has already begun to be called.
Sweatshops do not cease being sweatshops if they happen to be air-conditioned.
Whether you work on a loom or a code does not change anything at a certain
level.

It would be
helpful to ask ourselves as students of diaspora studies a straightforward
question: Can we cognitively distance ourselves from the currently predominant
ideological and economic world order and take a more honest view of the subject
of our study, and in the process also give a better account of ourselves? The
enormous sweep of diaspora studies would induce trepidation, but the search for
authenticity requires that we do not flinch. Uncomfortable preliminary questions
have got to be asked. Areas of darkness have got to be lit up.

The foremost
obligation is to question the privileging of literature and writing against
other cultural production of the diaspora such as films, music, dance, fine
arts, culinary arts, rituals and festivals, media, and even technology. We have
to get over the bias which derives probably from the modern university’s
received paradigm of scholarship that manifests in its preoccupation with
reading and writing understood rather narrowly. Diaspora studies need to address
the larger sphere of culture, including technology as cultural production.
Indeed, diaspora studies have the potential to bring about a radical
diasporisation of the disciplines themselves and a revolutionary restructuring
of the academy. For the time being, however, it seems the promise is going to be
wasted and diaspora studies will be co-opted by the conservative power
arrangements in the academy.

Lest this be
misconstrued, questioning the privileging of literature and writing does not
mean trampling over literature and reducing it to the flat monotony of trivia so
as to erase its specificity and refuse its power. On the contrary, even the
distinction, howsoever faint to the structuralist lens, between literature and
writing needs to be cherished, if only as a reminder that not all writing is
literature and that there is literature that is good and that which is
indifferent. Political correctness ought not to pervert judgement and obscure
the perception of aesthetic splendour, cognitive power and wisdom (Harold
Bloom’s three markers of the literary), nor should mere verbal flamboyance stand
in for a profound awareness of language as problematic. Indeed, we would be
inflicting no harm on literature if we reminded ourselves of the distinction
Roland Barthes makes between author
and writer, and acknowledged –without
feeling guilty– that Arundhati Roy is an author, Chetan Bhagat only a
writer.

It is
essentially a question of situating the object of our studies relatively. Of
situating literature in writing. And writing in cultural production.

That would,
of course, require us to begin at the beginning: that is, prepare digital
archives of diasporic cultural production. Without the archives, diaspora
studies will remain piecemeal affairs, feeding off whimsical academic hypotheses
like blinkered and hamstrung horses. In the absence of the archives, we cannot
even contemplate the vastness of the Promised Land, much less catch a glimpse of
it. An electronic network of the world’s universities, dedicated to diaspora
studies, with the Indian universities forming the hub for Indian diaspora
studies, is feasible today as it has never been before. But have we even begun
to want it? Do we really care to explore beyond the shady hedge around our
departments? Diaspora studies require disciplinary reconfigurations and
trans-departmental alliances: the existing order of knowledge in the academy
cannot accommodate the diasporic dis-order.

Then there
are methodological questions fraught with politics but which ought to be, as
academic propriety and freedom demand, tackled head on. Why should the scope of
diaspora studies be artificially delimited? Why not also include the Aryan,
Greek and Mughal cultural production? What stops us from reading the Rig Veda as
a diasporic text? Or the Gandhara art as the exemplum of diasporic hybridity? Or
Din-e-Ilahi as a statement of the politics of multiculturalism? Diaspora studies
could range farther back, beyond the safe confines of the present and the
recent, and examine the cultural production of both the diasporas fromIndia and the
diasporas inIndia. The
dialogic code which is always already written into the DNA of the diasporic
should invoke a double perspective.

Similarly,
India’s
subcontinental magnitude and cultural diversity dynamically activated by
internal migrations across regions and from towns and villages to metropolises
could be brought under the rubric of internal diaspora studies. It would be of
interest not only to sociologists and economists but to all others as well who
care about culture and its politics. The use of Punjabi by the migrant labour
from Bihar and Jharkhand and the mutation, if any, in
their native rituals and festivals are matters worth serious investigation.
Likewise, the implications of the massive illegal Bangladeshi diaspora for the
politics, economics and culture of the various regions of
India need to be
studied. The spheres of legitimate inquiry have to be determined by the academy,
not necessarily on instructions from political authority.

The “strange
category” of diasporic writing, so lamented by Tabish Khair, might then shed
some of its gratuitous strangeness and discover some honourable reason to be. The “critical space” of Khair’s
desire cannot be spun out of pleasant-sounding but airy universalist categories;
it can only arise from the spadework done on the terrain of history, prehistory
and the present.

The
telescoping of time in Surjit Pattar’s short poem Aaya Nand Kishore, for instance, yields
its secret of pain only to a historically aware reading, before the poem begins
to itself generate the critical space required for a closer reading. The poet’s
native/nativist gaze registers the itinerary of the migrant Nand Kishore with
complex irony, the only way available perhaps to simultaneously map the miseries
and the infatuations of the diasporic other from a nativist position which is
itself veined –as the Punjabi position is– with ambivalent contemporary
mythologies of exile.

Moreover, the
amorphous discipline of diaspora studies needs to grapple with the ongoing
reinvention of the mythologies of exile, for instance in cyberspace. Chetan
Bhagat’s One Night @ the Call Centre,
otherwise a puerile work of junk fiction produced by the emerging fast-food
publishing industry in this country, foregrounds a new diasporic subjectivity.
This is the pseudo-hybrid subjectivity of the third world call centre agents who
not only have to put on cybermasks to conceal their real identities but who are
compelled to even reconfigure, howsoever fragilely, their embodiment in order to
avert racist rejection and abuse. This is a strangely homeless subjectivity,
homeless in space, time and culture, the schizophrenic offspring of the culture
of real virtuality in a space of flows (Manuel Castells). And yet its sorrows,
albeit tragically shallow and captured with matching superficiality, are
heart-rending; and that is so probably for the reason that they are the betrayed
sorrows of a brutalized, reduced humanity which has been rendered incapable of
tragedy.

In other
words, diaspora studies confront new complexities. Precisely for that reason
perhaps, the peculiar amorphousness of this nascent discipline can be a source
of strength. Diaspora studies have to cast a wide net and yet not throw
discretion to the winds. The discipline cannot afford to become an academic
indulgence or pastime, or part of an intellectual retirement plan. There is at
the heart of diaspora studies a political commitment, a human obligation, a
spiritual debt waiting to be discharged, so that homelessness that was, that is,
and that is yet to be, can be brought home to all humanity. It is this which
places the discipline in the venerable company of philosophy, civilization
studies, human rights and futuristics, to name only a few of its
interdisciplinary soul mates.